


No Attachments

by jacenbren



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Death, Gen, Heavy Angst, Luke Skywalker Needs A Hug, Luke Skywalker is likely severely traumatized but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:48:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22609543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacenbren/pseuds/jacenbren
Summary: Even before Endor, Luke couldn’t sleep. The night terrors that kept him awake sent him into a spiral after his parentage was revealed and Yoda gave him strict instructions to keep him from collapsing:No attachments.Ironically, that’s what finally killed him, in the end.Attachments, or a lack thereof.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 32





	No Attachments

Luke couldn’t sleep. 

Every night, since Bespin, the nightmares started coming. 

Over and over and over. 

Often he ended up jamming his head under his pillow and screaming himself hoarse, trying to drown out the panic, but of course it was literally all in his head and he couldn’t stop it. 

_ I am your father  _

_ Darth Vader killed your father  _

_ Liar liar liar liar liar _

The phantom pains in his hand just made things worse. 

_ He’s my father _

_ My FATHER _

Luke ended up crying himself to sleep, missing his friends, missing Leia, missing Han (who wasn’t dead  _ yet),  _ and remembering the  _ no attachments _ rule of being a Jedi that Yoda had given him, apparently to protect him from getting hurt.

He had to hold everything in. 

Like Yoda had said.

That was the start of his spiral. 

———

Endor was straight up  _ terrifying.  _

Now, Luke was laying in a too-small bed in an Ewok hut, shaking and trying to recollect himself. 

Oh god, everything hurt. 

His chest and back had new scars shaped like lightning.

And his hand kept twitching. 

He’d tried so hard to stay happy for the party, for everyone else, but he’d ended up huddled in a corner, dissociating. 

Leia had asked him what was wrong. 

He’d brushed her off. 

Luke sucked in a few wheezy breaths, squeezing his eyes shut. 

His father was Anakin Skywalker. 

Who was dead now. 

He couldn’t tell anyone about how much pain he was in. He couldn’t let anyone get too close, not even Artoo. 

_ No attachments, young Skywalker _ _. No attachments. _

He finally drifted off again, but woke up screaming not two hours later. 

Luke gave up on sleeping. 

———

That was when his insomnia problems started: terrified of the night terrors, Luke kept himself awake, going days using caffeine to keep himself up until dawn.

He knew it wasn’t healthy, but it wasn’t like he’d sleep great anyway. 

Tonight, he was so exhausted he didn’t even hear Han until the man was right behind him, peering at his datapad. 

“That’s your fourteenth cup.”

Luke yelped, accidentally sending several books crashing off the shelves. 

“Sorry,” he mumbled frantically, scrambling for the books. “Shit. Shit, I’ll get it, no, don’t bother—“

“Are you okay?”

Luke froze. 

He glanced up. 

Han looked incredibly worried, waves of concern radiating off him as he stooped down to help with the books. 

_ No attachments no attachments  _

“M’fine,” Luke mumbled hurriedly. “Don’t worry about me.”

Han hesitated, his concern quickly shifting to uncertainty, but then he turned and left. 

Luke sighed in relief. 

He sat in his chair and picked up his datapad again, rubbing his eyes as he queued up an episode of a family sitcom he’d discovered. 

He didn’t know why he liked it so much. 

Maybe it was because the smiling people had such a good life, because all their current problems could be resolved in a single twenty-minute episode. 

Luke ended up dozing off with his empty cup of coffee in his hand. 

———

It was Life Day. 

A day for families to come together, for friends to meet and celebrate. 

Not for Luke. 

For his first Life Day without having to fight in a war, he spent the day before curled up in his room on Coruscant, drinking coffee and absently scrolling through his social media. 

When he’d first become so famous by blowing up the Death Star (the genocide of unwitting crew members and other innocents had been conveniently forgotten by the media), his HoloGram account had had a scant few followers. 

Now it had hundreds of millions. 

But  _ he _ only followed three accounts now: Leia, Han, and Wedge. 

A message pinged on the screen. 

_ Sis: Hey the Life Day party is at six tonight do you want to come over  _

Luke froze. 

His finger hovered over it. 

The knot of fear and guilt in his chest just swelled as he stared at the message, chewing his lip. 

He shivered and tugged his sweater tighter around his shoulders. 

He didn’t  _ feel  _ like going. 

Then again, he didn’t have much of a motivation to do anything, really. His head ached more often than not and he felt too jittery. But fatigued, too, which sucked. 

He heaved an exhausted sigh. 

Well, his manic days were worse than this. Other people had it worse. 

He typed in  _ yes  _ and sent it. 

———

An hour later he was at the party. 

For the most part he was fine, except for the noise and all the people. 

But then when he was curled up on the couch, trying to block out the incessantly loud and overstimulating amount of noise from all these people’s emotions all crashing into him, it happened. 

A bunch of drunk guys came staggering past, carrying bright sparking blue firecrackers, and

Oh

No

No

No

No

No

Luke panicked. 

Lightning. 

It looked like lightning and his muscles locked up reflexively but his mind wanted to bolt but then

There was a horrible crashing sound. 

The party stopped, and Luke snapped back to reality on the floor, his knees pulled up to his chest, the expensive champagne flutes in everyone’s hands shattered, as well as several people’s glasses and pretty much everything else made of glass. 

Leia was leaning over him, dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth. 

_ No attachments no attachments  _

“I’m s—sorry,” he stammered, staggering away and towards the door. 

“No wait—“ Leia started to say. 

Luke grabbed his coat and ran home. 

He ended up passing out on the futon as soon as he got through the door. 

And woke up two hours later, screaming. 

———

Everything was getting worse. 

Luke had tried talking to Leia in the weeks since the Life Day disaster, albeit what Yoda had said. 

It hadn’t gone well. 

She’d immediately asked how much caffeine he’d had, and that had ticked him off. Their latest conversation had devolved into a shouting match, and now Luke was having a panic attack in his apartment. 

His chest wouldn’t let him breathe. 

He felt sick. 

Luke ended up sobbing hysterically until he fell asleep again, but then the night terrors woke him up without fail. 

He just felt  _ so awful and sick.  _

Luke knew he couldn’t tell Han or Wedge, given that confiding about his awful feelings would yet again break the  _ no attachments  _ rule. 

And then he found himself sitting in the bathtub, drinking a cup of cold coffee and watching blood run down his arms. 

He remembered grabbing the letter opener and making the cuts. 

It evened out the imbalance between internal and external pain just enough that he could think. 

Luke  _ hated _ being able to feel how happy people were. 

He couldn’t feel that anymore. 

He couldn’t feel anything. 

———

“Luke, what did you  _ do?” _

Luke cringed. 

“Nothing,” he murmured, tucking his arms close to his chest. 

Leia had come to visit with news that she was pregnant, but then she’d seen the dozens of wounds Luke had carved into his own skin. 

Oh, he knew Leia was  _ so happy _ with Han, and they were  _ happy  _ and expecting a baby boy. 

Luke didn’t know how he knew. 

“Luke, we have to talk about this,” Leia said frantically. “This isn’t okay. You need to see a therapist.”

“I don’t,” he snapped, shivering even in his sweater. “I don’t need help.”

And then, sighing in defeat, Leia went through his apartment and took every single sharp object she could find. 

Every razor blade, every pair of scissors. 

And so Luke started picking open old scabs to cope instead. 

Leia tried to set him up with a therapist the next week, but he just felt too exhausted to leave his apartment, and ended up staring out his window and feeling the pale whispers of people walking down the streets instead. 

Other than that, Luke felt numb. 

———

Weeks passed. 

Luke got sick. 

He went to the doctor, shaking and shivering with fever chills as the medical droid scanned him. 

“You have blood poisoning, sir.”

Luke grimaced. 

He guessed it was from that big cut on his inner arm that got infected after he’d neglected treating it. 

He considered calling Leia. 

_ No attachments _

And so he went home alone with medication and sutures and a special bacta solution he was supposed to put on the cut nightly and a new blanket. 

He fell asleep on his futon. 

Night terrors. 

Screaming hysterically in his sleep. 

The whole ordeal. 

———

Luke knew he was teetering on a very dangerous edge, and he knew that anything could send him falling. 

And one day, something did. 

———

Luke remembered buying more razor blades and continuing to cut himself open over and over. 

The pain didn’t really affect him anymore. 

No more anesthetic for the terrifying chaos that was his mind, no more lighthouse to guide him through the raging storm of his consciousness. 

And he got the picture. 

Leia sent it to him. 

It was her and Han in their home on Naboo. Han was holding a baby in his arms, looking alarmed. Leia was smiling, and Chewie looked exasperated. Artoo and Threepio were there as well, and

_ So happy _

They looked so happy. 

Luke didn’t feel anything except sadness and guilt and indistinguishable pain. 

The text below read

_ Wish you were here! Your nephew Ben says hello! We miss you <3 _

And something in Luke’s chest broke. 

He started typing frenetically, typing out how much he loved his sister, that unrequited crush he’d had on Han, every little detail he’d forced himself to suppress because of that damn  _ no attachments  _ rule. 

He started  _ smiling  _ as he wrote down his final goodbyes. 

Then he sent it, threw down his datapad, grabbed his dusty lightsaber out of his desk drawer and threw on his favorite black outfit he’d worn to face his father. 

And he ran. 

Stumbling from fatigue. 

Laughing. 

He felt so free. 

Still giggling hysterically, he threw open the cockpit of his X-Wing.

And he flew away recklessly without a droid to help him, ignoring the horrible pangs of fear he could feel from Leia and Han and trusting the Force. 

———

He landed his X-Wing outside the long-abandoned, burned out homestead. 

Luke could sense the Imperial presence laying over the place like a heavy dark blanket, but he ignored it. 

This place felt like home.

The sand under his feet, Tatooine’s twin suns beating down over him. 

He wished he’d been a normal kid. 

Luke walked fearlessly into the scorched dwelling’s garage, where he’d found Artoo’s message what felt like a millennia ago. If anything were living there and attempted to kill him, he probably would’ve killed it in two seconds without stopping. 

He didn’t care anymore. 

Something in the sand blown inside caught his eye. 

He picked it up. 

It was his old model Skyhopper toy, back from when he’d been a naïve little kid. 

He saw a tear land on the dirty wing. 

And so he started cleaning the model, sitting cross-legged in the sand like a little kid. 

A little, extremely traumatized kid. 

A little, extremely traumatized kid who’d finally broken under the strain. 

By the time he finished, the suns were setting, and the wind had picked up a little, but that was okay. 

Luke smiled. 

Everything was okay. 

He stood in the same spot he remembered standing in when he was nineteen, gazing at the suns. 

He set down his model. 

Drew his lightsaber. 

Blew some of the dust off the hilt, which had collected after it hadn’t been used in approximately two years. 

Took a deep breath. 

And, lifting his head to gaze at the horizon, he held it lethal end-first against his stomach and activated the blade. 

Luke felt a stab of searing heat rush through his body as the blade burned a hole right through his torso and out the other side, but not much more. 

Peace, finally. 

Then his legs buckled and he fell to his knees in the sand, then on his side. 

Luke shut his eyes, sighing in relief and smiling happily as he slid off into the warm, comforting darkness of unconsciousness, still cradling his lightsaber against his body. 

He knew he wouldn’t have any more night terrors tonight. 

His suffering was finally over.


End file.
